I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you’re going to be in this business, if you’re going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin.
JOHN IRVINGLife,” Garp wrote, “is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.
More John Irving Quotes
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Our memory is a monster; you forget it – it does not.
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I still believe in getting married in churches and baptizing children. I go through those motions.
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You can’t learn everything you need to know legally.
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It happens to many teenagers-that moment when you feel full of resentment or distrust for those adults you once loved unquestioningly.
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My brain is sending poison to my heart.
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…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.
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The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything.
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Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
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You cannot drive with your eyes in the rear-view mirror… But dignity is difficult to maintain. Stamina requires constant upkeep. Repetition is boring. And you pay for grace.
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I grew up in a family where, through my teenage years, I was expected to go to church on Sunday. It wasn’t terribly painful.
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A part of adolescence is feelimg that there’s no one else around who’s enough like youself to understand you.
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I am compulsive about writing, I need to do it the way I need sleep and exercise and food and sex; I can go without it for a while, but then I need it.
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Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.
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We permit bad taste in this country. In fact, we even encourage it – and reward it in all manner of ways.
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Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parents’ own rule.
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I don’t begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
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How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
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In an episodic treatment, such as a teleplay is, you have the ability to do what you can do in a novel, which is flash back and flash forward in the same instant, in the same scene, in the same voice.
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I’ve always been slow but I’m even slower now. I’m more into the waiting, or I guess I’m more patient about the waiting.
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I have always believed that, in a story, if something traumatic or calamitous enough happens to a kid at a formative age, that will make him or her the adult they become.
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Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.
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It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
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…every study of the gods, of everyone’s gods, is a revelation of vengeance towards the innocent.
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Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
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There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
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Be serious. Life hurts. Reflect what hurts. I don’t mean that you can’t also be funny, or have fun, but at the end of the day, stories are about what you lose.
JOHN IRVING